Capitalist Resistance: US Flag of the Homeless

I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting & jerking off to our kinky private obsessions.

 --Dodie Bellamy

Dear Dodie,

I've always taken for granted that this is the only way I can work.

Best, etc.

Like Vulva in Thin Air

O bromeliad

young bromeliad

thy frankincense is mirth

pine cones never enter where saltshakers

stand guard

stop sign

stop sign

for raspberries are what it is worth

I have leaned far sideways

on flux barometers

stolen pokemon from spaghetti squash

robots are my progenitors in hazard

frozen peas will partway save us

you can see hello kitty in any dark

though I may be gone like mozambique 

I am with you all the time

like stick figures

like tuna

like uncle bear

like vulva in thin air

christmas lights, my dear, aren't pudding

nor are they freeway traffic

nor all the miles to Jupiter & never back

like elephants without a paddle

they are brave 

they are pansy

they are alcoholics with one less chair

TRUMP RESISTANCE HOMELESS AMERIKA FLAG

Two bunches of curtains enter from the left.
 
1st Curtain: Have you noticed?
2nd Curtain: Noticed what?
1st Curtain: Nothing.
2nd Curtain: Ah nothing! No. You?
3rd Curtain: Me neither.

Exit to Rear.
10 minutes pass.
Plastic cups of sand are served. 

An announcement: Your stars have all been schmooed. 
 
The End.

All the unicorns killed themselves. That's why you don't see unicorns anymore. To be a unicorn is to kill yourself. When you kill yourself you become a unicorn. You join the unicorns. That's the meaning of unicorns.

I sat around doing nothing all day & I felt really bad about it until I realized I'd been executing a Fluxus performance piece all along. I still felt really bad but at least I'd been accomplishing something by doing nothing. And thats the beauty of Fluxus.

There are people who don't ever want you to change & who wont accept the most radical changes you undergo. They want to fix you forever in their narrative, all too often as the villain. Run from these people. Run as fast & as far as you can from them. They will murder you as certain as if they stuck a knife in your heart.

Dear Noam Chomsky--
What does all the world’s toilet paper have to do with the use of the past participle? And why is it like this in this jar all the time with 3 bright new pennies?  Are you clear? Have you ever read John Fante? Killed a fly

with an elastic band? Sung Good King Wenceslaus

---with feeling?

I cooked a salmon tonight

half of it was perfect

the other half is swimming your way.

Yours truly, etc.

I want to be solitary. It's great. The best thing in the world is to get away from other people. It's glorious.

Said Charles Bukowski.

You can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
And the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

Said Charles Bukowski.

If the people around you don't understand you, it probably means that you're with the wrong people, or you're just on the wrong planet. Your imagination is your rocket ship to all the planets that exist in inner space. Travel to one of them.

It's time to paint cats. Cats in wonderland. Yeah, yeah it really is!

 



Everyone likes to say they're different, to think they're unique. But they aren't. Not really. In the end, they do pretty much what everyone else does, believe in what everyone else believes in.  They do a good job of fitting in or at least pretending to fit in. Being truly different is no picnic, no barrel of laughs. It's nothing to crow about. You end up misunderstood by everyone, friendless, alone, alienated. If you're lucky maybe one or two people "get" you, not counting your cats. All too often, you end up at the end of a rope.

The Old Spag Factory

The last time someone wrote a love poem

without a smirk or an apology

it was 1987.

I don't remember it well.

I had vasoline on my lips.

I was a Chevrolet in reverse.

I was Chinese checkers.

Because petroleum president & the halibut hum

the apricot turned over

the sock & such

there were 1001 unique moments

when the butter was in charge.

Questions, questions

the toilet brush

the mozambique

it’s time to stay horny for the sun

clamp your perfume

to the stony chimp—

I blasted off from tulip bulbs

room deodorant

siren

I’m with you my hairy monster

a great reunion of Indiana Pacers

eliminates the air

Here’s your gumbo, sir

off you ride your table horns

to the secondary moon

& three day’s beard

& filomena egg stump

& egg

& egg

oh Dad

the lumbar region!

She lived in the cities of the interior; she had no permanent abode. She was always arriving & leaving undetected, as through a series of trapdoors. The life she led there no one knew about. The statisticians of facts could never interview her.

Said Anais Nin. 

I won't cause you any trouble except to escape.

Said John Dillinger. 

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

Said Sylvia Plath.

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.  

Said Jean Rhys.

All true language is incomprehensible. Like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Said Antonin Artaud.

I have about a hundred cats living in me & all of them are curious. 

Said Kathy Acker.

When I face someone in the flesh, I can no longer speak & after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly & imaginary friends, only conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real & substantial.

Said Fernando Pessoa.

I suffer from a form of perverse sincerity. I don't want to be loved in spite of what is worst in me, but because of what is worst in me. I even go so far as to hope that what is worst in me is what people like best about me.

Said Michel Houellebecq.

Dear Noam Chomsky,

Before the sun, a bird. Before the bird a dream that slipped

away like a tail in a wall crack. How much of nothing

can even  the IRS tax? I know a few things about nothing.  

I know it throws open all the doors & leaves you waiting

anxiously, the coffee brewed, for yourself to come home.
Every cop in the world, bare-assed, hiding in the closet.

I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

Said Charles Manson

For thousands of years we’ve been saying what we don’t mean, pretending to feel what we don’t feel, acting like we’re better than we are, living under the dictatorship of other people. Why not wake up & say fuck all that this morning? Why not tell the truth for once in our lives?

I wish I could hang a "Sorry, We're Closed Sign" on my forehead or whatever the equivalent to that would be. I'd hang it there most of the time. Maybe at the bottom where they had a space for hours of operation I'd write "Call for an Appointment." Then add a made-up #.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Said Ludwig Wittgenstein

The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don't want out. And you're free. 

Said Charles Manson

I hate being human. To be expected to communicate is hell. To live in society is to have all your words chosen for you already. Freedom means refusing to say your assigned lines for which defiance they'll kill you or the equivalent thereof. I'd rather be a sex doll.

Scarecrow in Dark Glasses

The crow predicted your coming to this field

finding the USB cable in the softly whistling grass

which covers a cemetery of a thousand footsteps

the winsome passage of which you can hear even now

as when a salmon takes a violin from its case

& plays a music so sweet at the foot of your bed

that your skull fills up with the Indian Ocean

& you must beg beg beg those implacable hands

to let you come up for air

Dad’s Secret Pornography Stash

Russian tanks came rolling out of the donut hole

just as they were arriving at the Professor’s cottage.

Gilligan, the most recognizable entity within miles,

was perplexed by something simple. Let’s call it

polyphony. The first principles

of dust manipulation. They were left to chance

like a monkey in our collective pocket.

The color orange we can’t wash out.

We couldn’t get old Frida Kahlo off the floor

for walnuts. She was content to lie there

blowing bubbles at the rainforest ceiling.

No one could remember if she hung herself

or stuck her head in the oven or what

& if so what we ever did about it.

Remember, the life you save

may come back to haunt you.

Meanwhile, in another room, boarded up

for winter, their seed propagated a serpent elite

who left for California. Someone downstairs

was shouting “There are no George Washingtons!”

Just before the gunshots we wanted Woolite.

“Here are 98 cents of him!” someone

shouted back. BAM BAM BAM! He, too,

put on his hat & left, taking his soaking wet

boxes with him. “Him and his piranhas,”

said his weeping wife, who’d thrown him out.

Serves her right. Him, as well.

Ah so….

We’ve learned to live with the leopard

under the bed. The head stuffed with dust-bunnies,

the birdhouse with the broken leg.

These are the days Jesus remembered,

Jesus, who these days is Himself just a metaphor

for King Kong & a spicy brand of cheese spread

in an aerosol can who don’t redeem us nothin’.

He is crouched on the floor, holding a silver platter

lengthwise overhead that, combined with its twin above it,
stands in for all our stupid tears.

Congratulations, you’ve woken up this morning.

Thinking ahead to all the times you won’t,

it’s no mean trick.

The world outside your window

is just as you remember it.

The prayer flags yield gently to the wormy breeze.

The geese honking air in great gulps they’re so glad to be back.

From behind his computer, my husband reports

that North Korea still exists.

I have so much trouble

fastening my earring, I briefly consider
my ear may be on wrong.

Instructions for Surviving the Death of the Sun

Your personal life will be served ala carte when the universe 

begins shredding.  Your expectations last no longer than a heart’s 

failure. Step down a stairway of sparks. Take up blasphemy at the 

blackboard. The best flexibility will enable you to roam with 

scissors, eat many pineapples, & become a circle of superheroes.

The key is to find your ultraviolet songbird.

Your imaginary top hat.
Everything you fear is already on its knees.

Change of Face

For a long time I was so tired of my face that one morning I just took it off. It turned out to be easier than I imagined. There were two hinges, one behind each ear. All I had to do was disengage these hinges and the whole face came off like a plastic mask. Underneath was another plastic mask. Then another and another. As far as I could tell, it was masks all the way down. I stopped when I came to a cute squirrel mask. I’d always wanted to look like a squirrel. I couldn’t wait to debut the new me at work but when I got there no one seemed to notice the change. Peg in accounting asked me if I’d shaved off my mustache. I’ve never worn a mustache in my life, I replied with indignation. Bill, who shared my office, thought I’d gotten a haircut. Someone else wanted to know if I’d lost weight. It was so frustrating I wanted to scream, What’s the matter with you?! I’ve got a new face!! Are you all blind?! But that would have defeated the point. The only ones who noticed were the squirrels in the little park through which I walked every day to and from work. And they’d never accepted me and had made it clear a long time ago that they never would.

=A Quick Guide to Noam Chomsky=

A. Philosopher's flowing locks. 

B. Intellectual hand gesture. 

C. Lines from thinking deep thoughts  NOT from being perpetually baffled like most folks.

D. Wardrobe of a man with more important things to ponder than sweaters.  

E. Sad expression because other people are such hopeless dumb-asses.

Semi-Detached Muscle Salad

Abbreviation ballyhoo

we’re watching where you live

the soap the soup the zohar

rockets on the bridge

times up for subterranean

half-pipe elbowtown & grease

the empty robe

the buzzing bees

the ribcage

flying skulls

& creep

rainbow time for robots

master tongue

no more

swallow-up the universe

the clam machine

rising clean

the standard dish of poor

precipitation nowhere

eyeballed

cogent

door

rollercoaster clean

tachymeter dream

its here

its clear

the eye peep

fluster

boot

lockjaw

The Catastrophe Memo

These quests can only be completed once.

After a cosmopolitan bohemian life, you don’t

always see what’s going on in your own head.

For instance, champagne glasses.

Deaf policemen.

The sequel.

The first mouse moved quickly, gave up & drowned.

She was caught flat-footed,

clutching, like a crumb, a radioisotope.

Meaning: cirrus clouds with an eyeball on one end.

Almond cookies.

Geraniums.

Geniuses.

There is no end to the bed-springing.

Eerie events unfold.

The entrepreneur lights up.

She shows up in her bright fuzzy butcher’s apron.

Lamb’s wool & then some.

Philadelphia Raygun

Pigeons bubble around the popcorn lady's feet.

We know the dead are for sale. They smile haphazardly.

Some people were never meant to be children but a

 special kind of childproof brick. What were you hoping to learn?
My brain is a terrorist bomb 
exploding silently every hour.

Brief Interviews with Forgotten Underwear Models

She had a face like boiling milk, according to her principal biographers, Briggs & Stratton. She once said, I’m not the type to dissolve into a handful of asterisks tossed over some man’s bed. She once said, You’ll never find me combing the grass blades of any lawn in a northwesterly direction. On the outskirts of the small Tennessee town where she was born & raised, there’s still a gas pump dedicated to her memory. One day, we’ll all eat teriyaki on the beach without despair as the sky unrolls above us like a clean blue papyrus. She points to a blank spot in the distance and says wistfully, I used to be a hieroglyphic there once.